(indeed, "finishing a document" and "starting a document" are patterns)

17:27:23 [DanC]

(yes, I like targetting the boxes; it tends to be worth nailing those down as a group; sometimes the finding has to come first, and sometimes it can come after.)

17:28:20 [DanC]

q+ to try provoking a bit

17:28:32 [Vincent]

ack danc

17:28:32 [Zakim]

DanC, you wanted to try provoking a bit

17:29:16 [noah]

I wonder whether the versioning discussion is important to Dave at the F2F?

17:29:56 [noah]

q+

17:31:39 [Vincent]

ack noah

17:32:57 [DanC]

(I think the connection from metadataInURI-31 to semweb arch is pretty arbitrary too.)

17:33:24 [timbl]

(Norm, when it comes to NamespaceDocument-8 , it is worth saying in lots of places that any program should basically look namespace documents up one, maybe on installation, or maybe every few months, and keep it in a persistent cache. This is so the servers (at w3.org for example) don't get drowned in just re-requests for namespace documents. w3.org has a problem wit hDTD lookups no. )

17:33:55 [Norm]

(Hmmm. I see.)

17:35:40 [DanC]

(I am profoundly uninspired when it comes to security. It seems important, but darned if I can say anything specific about it.)

timbl: There's a pun in URIs used for two things; syntactically it's used as the prefix. But by itself it identifies the namespace document.

18:10:45 [Norm]

timbl: I think information resources always identify documents.

18:10:58 [Norm]

DanC: I didn't think that's where we landed.

18:11:34 [Norm]

timbl: Representations are the actual bitstreams. If the resource is a list of things, I'm happy to have the list in different orders if they're unordered.

18:11:41 [DanC]

what timbl actually said was "... I use information resource only for things that have a beginning, middle and end"

18:11:59 [DanC]

and I meant to ask "really? that doesn't sound like things that can be posted to."

18:12:16 [Norm]

Thanks for the correction, DanC

18:13:03 [Norm]

noah: The resource is the potentially infinite collection.

18:13:54 [Norm]

timbl: (reference to information theory) when you look this thing up, you're going to be more informed. An information resource to me is that information, not the subject of the information.

18:14:16 [Norm]

noah: would it be reasonable for me to define a resource which is all the square roots of all the integers.

18:14:29 [Norm]

noah: blah-blah-blah#144 refers to the number 12.

18:14:47 [Norm]

noah: Or "/", I'm just talking about the infiniteness of the set.

18:14:58 [Norm]

noah: One representation si a java program that computs the squre roots

18:15:19 [Norm]

timbl: For me, a representation is a string of bits and some metadata. What you get in http.

18:15:33 [Norm]

timbl: Those bits, in the given language convey the information that was the information resource.

18:15:56 [Norm]

noah: If the table wasn't infinite; if it was the square roots of the first 100 integers. I could then just give you an HTML page that conveyed it as a table.

18:16:25 [Norm]

timbl: No. The representation of the set must have a different URI. An information resource isn't a set of numbers.

18:16:41 [Norm]

timbl: The statement that the set contains these numbers is an information resource, but that's distinct from the set.

18:16:57 [Norm]

noah: I would have thought they could be conveyed as information.

18:17:19 [Norm]

timbl: We played with the words a lot

18:17:38 [DanC]

(where timbl says "it's improtant to distinguish between the set of numbers and the description of it", I'm not yet convinced. I agree that you _can_ distinguish, but I don't know why it's important to.)

18:18:45 [Norm]

timbl: It's not coherent not to distinguish between them.

18:19:37 [Norm]

noah: I want to distinguish them, but I think they're both information resources.

18:19:58 [Norm]

noah: What I hear timbl saying is that the only one I'm happy to call an information resource are the ones that are documenty

18:20:29 [Norm]

timbl: It's really important because the web is about communication and when I give you a URI I expect you to be able to get information with that URI.

18:21:30 [Norm]

noah: If you ask people what a namespace is, I don't think they'll say "document". It's more set like.

18:21:57 [Norm]

noah: Once we say "I've got that" now at some level, by the time we get to representations, everyone agrees that what we get is a document.

18:22:29 [Norm]

noah: The problem is that given a namespace in my left hand, there are lots of different kinds of documents that I might like to write; in RDF, in HTML, in English, in French, etc.

18:23:00 [Norm]

noah: But that leaves us in the position of asking what is the fundamental document that the namespace URI names (because I have to pick one). But then we trip over how one is a representation of the other.

18:23:09 [DanC]

(I find timbl's position mildly more appealing, but the argument seems to be by assertion. It's maybe good enough to convince me, but it's not at all good enough for me to take and convince other people.)

18:23:16 [Norm]

noah: What's really fundamental is the set; how can we use webarch to say that that is on the web?

18:23:36 [Norm]

timbl: we could make it clearer by having a 303 response.

18:24:24 [Norm]

timbl: As a result, the only thing that's identified by the URI is some collection of documents.

18:24:56 [Norm]

timbl: It's not neat and tidy, but none of the processes that get the URI really need the abstraction.

18:25:06 [Norm]

noah: I could say that I control that namespace, yes?

18:25:25 [Norm]

timbl: Yes, you can talk about the document, but they all use the DC namespace to talk about how they're managed.

18:25:37 [Norm]

Scribe isn't sure he captured that

18:26:10 [Norm]

timbl: We don't have a way in rdf of saying that this property is in a namespace; we don't have the concept of a namespace.

DanC: Yes, that one of the documents would say that the SPARQL example is good or not.

18:28:17 [noah]

Well, I guess what I'm hung up on is that in practical terms, the namespace is an important thing. People talk about namespaces all the time. If we don't have a simple, first class way to give a Web name (I.e. URI) to the namespace itself, it seems we've lost something important.

18:28:21 [Norm]

vincent: I don't think we can go further today.

18:28:33 [noah]

Fodder for the F2F?

18:30:28 [Norm]

Noah: We don't have a clean simple story about what a namespace URI identifies that avoids a 20 minute discussion

18:31:09 [Norm]

Norm: I share Noah's concerns about the practicality

18:31:26 [Norm]

vincent: I'll plan to schedule discussion about abstractComponentRefs again when Dave is present.

I note that DanC's point was different form Noah's. Dan C seemed to be asking whether something could be a set of names and alos a document. Noah and Tim seemed to agree that the set of terms and the document were distinct things, and just differ in which they were suggestsing was names by the NSURI.

18:33:01 [DanC]

I'm not interested to persue that point any more, fyi.

18:33:11 [DanC]

" whether something could be a set of names and alos a document"

18:33:15 [DanC]

hmm.

18:33:22 [DanC]

well, maybe. I don't advocate it, in any case.

18:34:01 [DanC]

There's a clear-and-present question in the semweb best practices WG: can a wordnet word (synset) be an information resource?

18:34:07 [EdR]

RRSAgent, make logs public

18:34:31 [EdR]

Zakim, list participants

18:34:31 [Zakim]

As of this point the attendees have been Raman, Ed_Rice, Vincent, Norm, DanC, noah, TimBL

I tried to explain to them that </TR/webarch> log:notIncludes { InformationResource disjointWith WordNetWord }. but not matter what I wrote, they read positions from me, not clarifications on webarch, so I have stopped.